A Technical History of the SEI

Configuration Management
The Challenge: Configuration Support for Software Developers
When the SEI was founded in the mid-1980s, software development was already a complex activity,
with single projects often involving millions of lines of code and large (often distributed)
teams of developers. At the time, developers in government and industry, including government
contractors, adapted established configuration management (CM) practices in other engineering
disciplines, such as versioning of design documents and physical system parts and managing
changes through change control boards [IEEE 1987]. They complemented these practices with
version control systems to manage versions and revisions of their source code; they used databases
for tracking versions and changes to the artifacts. Many were home-grown systems. However,
software development presented several unique challenges. First, software development is a
continuous design activity in which bug removal affects the design. Second, software design and
source code are easily changed, and configuration, parameterization, and deployment of software
on hardware can result in unexpected system behavior. Third, software development is easily distributed
across multiple teams, thanks to networked computing environments, which were emerging
in the early 1980s. Finally, at that time, system engineering drove the development process,
with software developers getting involved late in the process and having to write code against ambiguous
specifications and repeatedly changing requirements. (These were some of the factors
contributing to the software crisis that prompted the establishment of the SEI.)
A Solution: Configuration Management Tools
In the 1980s, DARPA—the main SEI sponsor—was interested in research into configuration support
for software development environments, both for Ada specifically and for environments in
general. At the SEI, work was soon under way to establish a framework for improving the software
process, which became known as the Capability Maturity Model [Humphrey 1988]. This
framework included configuration management as a key process area, leveraging established CM
practices [IEEE 1987].
From the mid-1980s to 1993, the SEI worked on tool-based solutions supporting the full software
development process and complementing the organizational process focus of the CMM. The SEI
quickly expanded from evaluating Ada environments [Weiderman 1987] to integrated software
development environments (ISDE). Recognizing the challenges of configuration management for
software, in 1988 the SEI established a series of international software configuration management
workshops under the auspices of the ACM, chairing the first set of workshops [Winkler 1988,
Feiler 1991]. These workshops continued for more than a decade. The SEI published papers on
the role of CM in integrated environments [Dart 1989], the different roles CM plays throughout
the software system lifecycle and the concepts supporting them [Feiler 1988], and process support
through CM [Feiler 1989]. To facilitate collaboration between the software process and the ISDE
research communities, the SEI published a set of software process development and enactment
concepts and definitions [Feiler 1992]. As promising research results emerged, the SEI assessed
the state of the art in ISDE and its support for CM [Brown 1992, 1993a]. In the early 1990s, the
SEI provided the co-chair of the Navy NGCR Project Support Environments Standards Working
Group (PSESWG) and took on a lead role in the development of a reference model for Integrated
Software Engineering Environments [Brown 1993b], which included configuration management
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